Taken for Dead (Kate Maguire) (12 page)

‘Well, take your shower now and think about that later,’ said Norman. The sight and smell of Denny was making him feel like going out into the garden, for all that it was teeming with rain, and taking a deep cold lungful of fresh air.

‘Thanks again for doing this, sir,’ said Denny. ‘I know how rank I must look to you now, but you should see me when I’m all dickied up.’

Norman gave him a brittle smile. ‘I’ll leave you alone, then,’ he said, although he was thinking,
I must make sure to throw that bar of soap in the bin after
.

***

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Meryl asked him when he came back downstairs. ‘I’ve just brewed a pot.’

‘Wouldn’t you better off with a strong cup of coffee?’ Norman demanded. ‘You go out drinking with some anonymous friend and come back home bringing some stinking beaten-up tramp with you. I think you owe me an explanation, don’t you?’

Meryl said, ‘Very well. I won’t lie to you, Norman. It was Eoghan.’

Norman stared at her in disbelief. ‘
Eoghan
? Eoghan Carroll, you mean? What in the name of God were you doing going out drinking with Eoghan Carroll of all people?’

‘I told you. We were catching up, that’s all.’

‘I hope that was all you were doing. No wonder you didn’t answer my calls. Eoghan Carroll, for Christ’s sake. He’s a married man now, just like you’re a married woman.’

‘We went for a drink and a laugh, that’s all. I’m not your prisoner, Norman, and just because we’re married that doesn’t mean I can’t have an innocent conversation with a man who used to be my boyfriend.’

‘Jesus. I don’t believe it. And to think I trusted you. And I’ve only gone and left my phone upstairs in my dressing room.’

‘Norman – ’

‘Oh, don’t “Norman” me, girl. I thought we had a marriage as solid as a rock.’

‘We do, Norman! Eoghan wanted us to get a room in a hotel, but I said no. I told him it was long over, me and him.’

‘I’ll kill him! I will personally strangle him, I swear it! I have to get my phone.’

Norman went back upstairs, leaving Meryl in the living room with her eyes filled with tears. The power-shower motor in the attic was still rumbling, but as Norman passed the bathroom door he could hear that the shower itself had stopped clattering, so Denny must have finished washing himself.

He had taken only a few more steps along the corridor when he heard Denny say something like, ‘Yes, okay, that’s grand.’

Norman tiptoed back to the bathroom door and inclined his head towards it.

There was a moment’s silence, and then Denny said, ‘Okay, yes. I have you. Yes. I’ll see you at five at Michael’s.’

His voice was gummy and indistinct, and he said ‘yesh’ instead of ‘yes’ and ‘shee’ instead of ‘see’, but there was no doubt that he was talking to somebody on a mobile phone, and that he was making an arrangement to see them later.

For a while he said nothing but ‘yesh’ and ‘yesh’ and ‘I deck that, yesh’. But then he said, ‘No, no question at all, they’ve shwallowed it one hundred per cent. I should hope sho, any road. The husband especially, Norman. He’s really getting thick about it, sho I think he will. Yesh. For sure, yesh. Okay. I’ll shee you after.’

Norman felt like bursting into the bathroom and demanding to know who Denny had been talking to, and what he and Meryl were supposed to have swallowed one hundred per cent. Instead, though, he gently eased down the door handle and pushed the door a little way open so that he could see inside.

The bathroom was still humid from Denny’s shower. Denny was standing in front of the washbasin with his back to the door, towelling his neck and his shoulders, but the mirror was steamed up so that he couldn’t see Norman looking in at him. A black mobile phone was resting on the shelf next to Norman and Meryl’s toothbrush mug.

Denny had been abducted
, thought Norman,
and yet his abductors hadn’t taken his mobile phone off him?
That made no sense at all. More remarkable than that, though, almost all of his bruises had disappeared. He still had a few faint red marks on his back, but all of the darker bruises had vanished completely. Norman could only conclude that they hadn’t been real bruises at all, but make-up of some kind, and that Denny had soaped them off in the shower.

Tempted as he was to confront him, Norman quietly closed the door. He hurried to his dressing room to collect his phone and then went back downstairs. Meryl was standing by the window, looking miserable.

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she said. ‘I never should have gone with Eoghan for a drink. It was only for old times’ sake.’

‘Don’t worry about that now,’ said Norman. ‘Your man upstairs is an impostor. He has a mobile phone up there with him, and all of those bruises he showed us, they’ve all washed off. He was talking to somebody about how he’s managed to fool us, and he’s arranged to meet them at five o’clock.’

Meryl stared at him. ‘You’re serious?’

‘I heard him and I saw him for myself. With a bit of luck, though, I don’t think he saw me.’

They heard the bathroom door open. Norman put his finger to his lips and whispered, ‘The best thing we can do is act as if we don’t suspect anything. He might turn violent if we let him know that we’re on to him, or call his friends to come round here and give us a beating, or worse.’

‘So what are we going to do?’ Meryl whispered back.

‘Act natural. Give him a cup of tea and then I’ll drive him into the city. But I’ll call the guards before I go so that they know all about him, and where I’m going to drop him off. I can’t imagine what kind of a game he’s playing, but it seems to me like it could be very dangerous.’

Denny appeared in Norman’s yellow zig-zag sweater and his olive corduroy trousers, carrying his old clothes rolled up under his arm. He was smiling as much as his swollen lips would allow, although they were bleeding a little where the scabs had washed off and he had to keep dabbing them with a folded piece of toilet paper.

‘Feeling better, Denny?’ Meryl asked him, trying hard to sound natural.

‘Grand altogether, thanks to the both of you. I’ll never forget this.’

‘Well, sit down and I’ll pour you a cup of tea. Do you think you could manage some brack?’

‘I don’t know about that. My gums are fierce sore. But the tea would be welcome.’

‘I’ll drive you into the city after,’ said Norman. ‘Any place special you want me to drop you?’

‘Grand Parade, right outside the old Capitol Cineplex, that would be perfect.’

‘No problem at all,’ said Norman. ‘I’ll go and get my car out. You take your time with your tea, Denny. After what you’ve been through, you need to take it easy.’

Katie was sitting in the waiting room outside the intensive care unit at Cork University Hospital when her iPhone rang.

Dr Owen Reidy was calling from his pathology laboratory in Dublin. He sounded unusually amiable, as if he might have taken a glass of wine with his lunch, or maybe two.

‘We’ve finished examining your man’s head, Detective Superintendent. So far as we can tell, it was severed with a chainsaw. It’s impossible to say without the rest of his body whether this was done before or after life was extinct. Even if it was done before, it certainly would have been extinct after.’

The fluorescent light in the waiting room flickered and made a buzzing noise like a bluebottle, and the rain pattered sporadically against the windows.

‘Any other marks or bruises?’ Katie asked him. ‘Presumably somebody must have held his head still while they cut it off, even if he was dead already.’

Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán was sitting with her legs crossed on the opposite side of the room, flicking through a copy of
Hello!
, but she looked up when Katie said that.

Dr Reidy said, ‘There are five distinct bruises to his temples which were probably caused by thumb and finger pressure, but we weren’t able to lift any prints from them – not entirely surprising since his head was subsequently baked in a cake. However, he’s missing three teeth from his lower left jaw – the second and third molars and second premolar.

Dr Reidy hesitated, but Katie could sense that he had something more to tell her, something critical. He always enjoyed disclosing his findings with dramatic pauses, and he always left his most important revelations until last.

‘All three teeth were extracted at the same time, and I would say that they were taken out almost immediately prior to the victim’s beheading, because the cavities hadn’t even begun to heal. What’s more, they weren’t pulled out by any dentist, I can tell you that for certain. The gums were damaged in such a way that I would guess they were forcibly removed with pliers.’

‘Ordinary DIY pliers, like you’d buy in Hickey’s?’

‘Exactly that. We found squarish contusions around the cavities which exactly match a pair of 125mm flat-nose linesman’s pliers.’

‘You’ll send me your pictures?’ said Katie.

‘Of course. They should be coming through to you in the next few minutes. Full report to follow. Difficult to give you an exact date and time of death because of the effects of the baking process, but I’ve done my best.’

Katie said nothing to Dr Reidy about Derek Hagerty’s teeth being sent in a jam jar to his wife. Those teeth, too, had been forcibly extracted, but so far she had no irrefutable proof that Micky Crounan and Derek Hagerty might have been abducted by the same offenders, even though each new piece of evidence seemed to be telling her that it was increasingly likely.

She told Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán what Dr Reidy had said to her, and then she rang Inspector Fennessy and informed him, too.

‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘It gives me the raging toothache just to think about it.’

‘Have you heard from the bomb squad?’

‘Not more than ten minutes ago. They searched the car park but they didn’t find any more devices. I’ve just had a call from the technical boys, too. The bomb was definitely C-4, probably about twenty to twenty-five pounds of it, judging by the blast damage. It was detonated by a mobile phone.’

‘Any indication who might have built it?’

‘Bill Phinner says what’s left of the wiring suggests that it might have been put together by Fergal ó Floinn. Either ó Floinn himself or somebody that he might have taught to put a bomb together.’

‘Ó Floinn? That piece of work. He swore blind to me after that Cathedral Quarter bombing in Belfast that he would never touch an ounce of explosive again as long as he lived. Of course, that bombing was nothing at all to do with him. None of those bombings ever were.’

‘Well, as I say, we can’t be certain that it was him,’ said Inspector Fennessy. ‘I’ve asked Patrick to find out where he is, though, and we’ll be having a word.’

‘Okay. Good. But don’t let him fob you off with his usual
buinneach
.’

‘What’s the news on Brenda McCracken?’ asked Inspector Fennessy.

‘She came out of surgery about an hour ago,’ said Katie. ‘They haven’t told me anything except that she’s critical.’

‘We’re all praying for her. She’s one of the best. Fearless, absolutely fearless, that girl, and always ready with a laugh.’

‘I’ll call you as soon as I get an update so,’ Katie told him. ‘Right now, I think our prayers are probably the best chance she has.’

***

Katie sat in the waiting room for another twenty minutes, while Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán repeatedly went out into the corridor to answer calls on her mobile phone and to send texts to the detectives who were making inquiries all over the city about the bombing in the Merchants Quay car park. They were also still looking for Micky Crounan’s decapitated body. Three floaters had been fished out of the River Lee in the past four days, but one was a heavily pregnant Nigerian woman, and although the other two were both white and male and middle-aged, their heads were still attached.

Katie checked her watch, then she stood up and said, ‘I’ll have to go back to the station, Kyna. It’s coming in from all sides and I need to take control. I don’t want Bryan Molloy accusing me of neglecting my duty because I’m a sentimental woman.’

‘With that feen you can’t win either way,’ said Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán. ‘I’ll bet if you hadn’t stayed here to see if Garda McCracken was going to pull through, he would have blamed you because you showed no compassion for the rank and file.’

Katie picked up her grey leather shoulder-bag, but as she did so one of the surgeons came into the waiting room. He was a thin Iranian with protuberant eyes and a hooked nose, and a small black pillow of hair on top of his head that might have been a wig.

‘DS Maguire?’ he asked. He spoke so softly that Katie could hardly hear him. ‘My name is Saeed Akbari. I am the leading surgeon of the team that has been trying to save the life of your colleague.’

‘How is she?’ asked Katie.

‘I regret to tell you that there is no more hope for her survival. She suffered catastrophic internal injuries and it was a miracle that her heart went on beating for as long as it did. She is still on life-support at the moment but she can never recover.’

‘So there’s no hope at all?’

Mr Akbari shook his head. ‘None whatsoever, I am afraid. Without life-support she would have passed away already.’

‘I understand,’ said Katie. ‘Can I go in and see her?’

‘Of course. Her sister is there already, as well as Father Burney.’

He led Katie and Detective Sergeant Ni Nuallán along the corridor to the ward where Garda McCracken was lying behind curtains. Her curly-haired sister was sitting on the left-hand side of the bed, while Father Burney was standing on her right, his hands clasped together, holding a rosary. A plump bespectacled nurse was sitting next to him, busily filling in a form on a clipboard.

Brenda McCracken herself was lying with her eyes closed and an oxygen mask covering her face. Underneath the thin green cotton blanket that covered her, her chest was protected by a metal cage. The heart monitor beside the bed was tirelessly beeping, but it was only counting out the seconds that the respirator had allowed her to borrow. In reality, she was dead already.